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How to Unleash the Potential in Others (Part 1)

Coaches, parents, business owners all want to get the best out of the people in their lives. They want them to live productive and fulfilling lives and make their mark on the world. This becomes a difficult request if you are not getting the most out of yourself. People can sense this inconsistency between “what a leader preaches and what they practice”. Leadership expert John C. Maxwell states in The 21 Irrefutable Law of Leadership that great leaders influence not just by what they say but by how they act, “The leader’s effective communication of the vision makes the picture clear. But that is not enough. The leader must also live the vision. The leader’s effective modeling of the vision makes the picture come alive!”.

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Now the next question is how do you unleash your potential? First and foremost it starts with your beliefs or as Don Miguel Ruiz calls them, “agreements”. In his book The Four Agreements Don states that “agreements” are any insight, experience, or knowledge that you have come to believe which becomes part of your belief system. If we don’t believe it, it does not become part of the system. However these “agreements” that we have held for many years can be incorrect or incomplete and severely limit our potential. The “agreements” influence how we perceive the world and thus how we act towards it as well. To really maximize our potential we need to begin questioning our assumptions that we have held over the years. If we do this often times we can undergo impressive personal growth and break free from our faulty thinking like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Here are a couple easy way to start testing your ”agreements.”

Listing experiences (positive or negative) that you have had and then list the particular beliefs you had which resulted in the actions you took.

Read a variety of books/ articles that expose you to different viewpoints/ beliefs.

In the next part we will begin discussing what is perhaps the most limiting and common barrier in thinking. This is an idea that if we could only brace we could truly amaze ourselves with what we could do.